If you have a formal structured recruitment, then having every chapter offer bids to everybody they want would be chaos. If there are 15 sororities and 1200 PNMs, then it's possible that all 15 could offer bids to a couple hundred women. You could have one chapter getting 100 PNMs and another chapter getting 300 while others could end up with 20 or 30. You have no way of knowing who is really interested in your chapter because none of the rounds are invitational and PNMs can attend as many as they want. You would have to do away with the Total/Quota system completely because how would you determine quota or make sure that chapters only took quota?

At smaller colleges/universities, this can work, but not at the larger ones. That is why NPC now has 4 different options available, with guidelines for each College Panhellenic to determine, with guidance from the NPC area advisor. At a campus with two or three groups where quota is typically less than 10, then an informal recruitment can work very well. There is flexibility with all this.

I don't know whether it would be better or not, but if the guys manage to do rush that way at huge schools, surely we could too?

Part of the reasoning is that this will keep as many chapters healthy as possible. The IFC fraternities don't really seem to be interested in that. It is beneficial for sorority life in general if as many chapters as possible meet quota. There's a larger number of fraternities and, at least from what I've seen, a much greater mobility in the number of chapters on campus. Guys don't rush all of the chapters, just the ones they're interested in. This isn't in the benefit of all the chapters (in the NPC's opinion).

*shrug* it's kind of like saying, why don't we recruit like the D9? Because we don't.

The difference is that most of the guys who rush don't go to every single fraternity. (I'm envisioning the guy at Penn State with 60 bids.)

See, I don't think this would work even on a small campus like mine. I think that chapters would bid like crazy, and because girls are girls, they'd take a bid to a sorority that probably isn't their best fit, because it is "one of the best" (see also: Duke thread and Core Four). Then again, the institution of a ceiling would help as well. Dunno...maybe im just stuck in the "this is the way its been done" mode?

No, if anything, the fact that you think this wouldn't go over just proves it is a bad idea (i.e. because your campus is all local and not bound by "NPC says so").

That was for this rush period only. Who knows, next fall there may be a huge increase in interest in Greek life and quota may be set at 50.

Or there may be a huge decrease in interest in Greek life, and there may only be 40 women rushing. And they may all want the same group, and refuse to take bids from anywhere else.

I'm not quite sure I understand the "every chapter can only give out 16 bids on bid day" thing - if Accessories is as small as you said it is compared to the other groups, they should still be able to snap bid up to chapter total, whether this is a formal or informal rush. You cannot prevent a group from bidding up to total unless there are extenuating circumstances (like a colony on campus).

Doing it that way also leads to the problem of knowing where you are on the bidlist. I'd hate knowing I wasn't good enough for the first list but got a bid because I was a little further down.

Exactly. And then PNMs might not want to take a snap bid because they don't want to feel like "sloppy seconds".

Exactly.

Or I could picture the split in a pledge class if you had really bitchy girls. The A group and the B group. Or anything. It's way better that no one really knows where on the list they are, and even the members don't have a concrete idea of where girls are, they're just thrilled to meet the newbies on bidday! All at the same time.

Okay, while we are creatively restructuring recruitment, how about this idea:

PNMs rank.
Sororities receive PNMs' rankings.
Sororities choose X number of bids to give out (where X=quota calculated as number of PNMs/number of chapters)

i'm coming in late, but I wanted to say congratulations!

My only concern with this would be, would sisters see exactly how the PNMs rank? Or would there be a middle party? (Gamma Rho Chis or GA) Because I know that it's always a concern at our school that sisters will find out the PNMs ranked their group 2 or 3 on Pref lists and sisters being less than friendly to some of those girls... :cool:

sangers, if you are a member of an npc sorority, your alumnae and the greek life advisor should be matching bids during formal recruitment-even if matching is done by a computer. unless that information is taken out of the bid matching area and shared with collegiate members(and if should not be) then the chapter should not know how their new member class ranked their choices.

oops, my bad, just goes to show that sometimes i am not adept at multitasking!!

in the scenario that you quoted, then the members or at least the officers or those appointed to the task would know how the pnms ranked. reading that i guessed that in that scenario, the sorority would only extend bids to those pnms who had ranked them first.

Walk me through why it's bad to have to go to a full schedule of parties even if you aren't really that interested in the groups.

The way it seems to me, you only get bids from the groups you weren't crazy about if your choice groups don't want you bad enough.

If you know that you only want a bid from a few, then only put the ones that you want on the bid card. The only thing you lose is a chance at being a quota additions, right?

I also don't totally understand the benefits of being able to get more than one bid. Is it the chance to keep thinking it over? Or is it that you don't want groups to have a quota? Your want them to be able to take whoever they want without limit?

(Is anybody really truthful about why people get snap bids? Nobody actually says, "Well, we wanted some other people more, but since they picked other groups, we now want you" or "we know that you cut us to pref someplace else, but we saw that you were still not matched. We really want to make quota or reach chapter total, and now that you know you're not too good for us, we thought we'd give it another shot.")

(Now that I see your answer, I remember that I've talked about this before. I apologize if I'm repeating myself.)

I can see what you are saying. Don't you think there are some people though whom come back and change their minds?

I think at UGA what would happen is that a lot of girls would cut themselves out after second round. After first round they would cut the groups who were really interested in them, and then they'd be left with nobody if there early first choices released them.

Maybe for prefs, you are right, but at that point, it's probably just a heads up to the chapter of how bad things are going to be on bid day, as opposed to being able to do anything about it.

No, it's more like "we know you wanted someone else and didn't match with them, but we still want you to be OUR sister because we think you'd be happy in the long run." I think boiling it down to a numbers only thing is a little cynical.

Plus, sometimes the people you offer snap bids to WERE on your first bid list, they just didn't put you down, so it's not a case of "wanting other people more."

Yeah, you're right. Sometimes it's because you want to give people a second chance because you know rush makes people crazy. You can know they would be a good fit even if they don't know it yet.

In the second example, though, you're really just kicking the situation back to the second kind of snap: when the chapter wanted the girl, but the girl didn't want the chapter.

I kind of intended the first example for the times when you offer bids to girls because not enough of the ones on your bid list actually accepted and you find yourselves with openings. Usually this happens because chapters "cut themselves out" rather than because their numbers were generally low.

I think release figures may be helping all of this because in addition to keeping some of the most popular from stringing everyone along, it also allows smaller chapters to know how many people they need to think in terms of bringing back, even if they are tempted to cut more. Back in the olden days, some chapters would get kind of cut happy because they misread people's interest level.

As long as it's after groups cut the majority of the people they aren't seriously interested in, I think it could work. It's just tricky because a lot of us believe that there should be an incentive to encourage PNMs to give the chapters that didn't first wow them a second or third chance. It's important that they have a chance to go back after their dream groups cut them.

Although many girls get bids from the first choice of the groups on the bid card, I think it's a much tinier group that get bids from the group they picked as number one after 1st round. If we let the PNMs cut group too early and if we don't have an incentive for them to keep their eyes open, it increases the chance that they won't join at all.

Sometimes I do wonder what it would be like to have a system like the guys do: as long as you're happy with the numbers and your national group thinks you're healthy, there doesn't seem to be pressure to take a certain number of people. At every campus, there are well regarded guys' chapters of different sizes. But in the traditional NPC recruitment, quota, chapter total system, to be more than maybe 10-15% smaller than the biggest chapter often makes the chapter suspect.

(You know how guys can kind of give out bids any time and they aren't limited in number? Do you think that if women's groups did that some women would forever stalk certain chapters?)

If each chapter can only give out 16 bids, what if they give them all to the same girls? Are the other PNMs just out of luck? That's not fair to the women who made it to pref but weren't at the very top of the list. I know mutual selection is a flawed process, but it's the most fair thing we've got for now.

YES.

Sometimes they even try to join other orgs that the members are in. (insert barf icon)

That's why no matter how far you are under total, it's never good to totally show your hand and have open bid parties week in and week out - because sooner or later, you WILL have Nutbag Nora show up saying "well hey, you need girls, what about me?" and you'll have to explain to her that although "sane" is not expressly listed in your membership requirements, it is implied.

the bolded part had me ROTFL!!!!!!

Omg, ASUADPi, I love you for having POTC quotes. And yes, the sane part was freaking hilarious!! :D